Victorian Popular Fiction Association



“A Sudden Swift Impression”: Re-Examining the Victorian Short StoryA Study Day with the Victorian Popular Fiction AssociationUniversity of Brighton, 27th January 2018ABSTRACTSLucy Andrew, ‘There’s no place like Holmes: the short story series and the development of the juvenile detective genre’When detective fiction for the young emerged in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, with the publication of The Boy Detective; or, The Crimes of London. A Romance of Modern Times (1865-66), it did so in the form of the ‘penny dreadful’ – cheap, serialised novels published in weekly parts and aimed specifically at working-class boys. There were a number of reasons why the juvenile detective genre did not thrive in the ‘penny-dreadful’ form and it was only with the transference of detective fiction to the short story series format in the 1890s that the genre gained any real momentum and popularity with the young. This paper explores the development of the detective short story series in the Harmsworths’ boys’ story papers from the 1890s onwards, concentrating upon their most successful and longest running series: Sexton Blake (1893-1940) and Nelson Lee (1894-1940). I will consider the attraction of the short story series format for young readers over the serialised novel format. I will also examine the links between boys’ detective short story series and their famous adult counterpart, Sherlock Holmes, and explore the ways in which this connection ensured the marketability and respectability of the Harmsworths’ detective series. Finally, I will focus upon the fluidity and adaptability of the detective short story series format, exploring this form’s ability to reflect and respond to social and cultural developments and changing literary trends. I will conclude by establishing where and how the short story series format influenced the growth of the juvenile detective genre beyond 1940 when the majority of the story papers folded as a result of wartime paper shortages.Biography: Lucy Andrew is Lecturer and Programme Leader in English Literature at University Centre Shrewsbury, part of the University of Chester. She is the author of The Boy Detective in Early British Children’s Literature: Patrolling the Borders between Boyhood and Manhood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and co-editor of Crime Fiction in the City: Capital Crimes (University of Wales Press, 2013). She is co-organiser of the Short Story Network with Dr Vicky Margree.Key text: Maxwell Scott, ‘A Dead Man’s Secret’,?Halfpenny?Marvel, 46 (18 September 1894), 1-15. Available at: HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" Beller, ‘Collapsing the Courtship Plot: The Challenge to Mid-Victorian Romance in New Woman Short Stories of the 1890s’In the 1890s, New Woman writers experimented with new genres and forms, in order to explore the paradoxes and problems they perceived women to face. One of these issues was how to integrate New Woman principles of autonomy and independence with emotional fulfilment in love and relationships. This led to a critical engagement with earlier Victorian ideals of heterosexual romance in a bid to re-imagine and re-invent a new courtship plot underwritten by principles of equality and liberty. The difficulty they experienced in this task is demonstrated by the infrequency with which they successfully achieved such resolutions and many New Woman novels end disappointingly in death and defeat. For women writers who sought a new form within which to effectively articulate new subject matter, the short story offered a number of advantages over the novel. Freed from the restrictions of an extended narrative and perhaps cumbersome plot, the short story could focus on single moments, fragments of experience. Moreover, the short story form meant that the traditional courtship and marriage plot of the mid-Victorian three-decker could be transformed or circumvented altogether. What often takes its place is a failed courtship plot, which thus removes marriage as the typical resolution. In this paper I examine the ways in which two women writers of the 1890s attempted to rewrite the script of mid-Victorian courtship through the short story genre. In Mona Caird’s “The Yellow Drawing Room” and Ella D’Arcy’s “The Pleasure Pilgrim” we see a revision of, and challenge to, the doctrine of separate spheres. Yet, arguably, while both texts critique what they present as outmoded views of woman’s sphere and nature, they also articulate the difficulties experienced by both genders in imagining an evolved and improved model of sexual relations. Arguably, these two short stories represent the collapse in New Woman fiction of the traditional “courtship plot” through a failure to re-imagine and re-map the mid-Victorian gender ideology they seek to dismantle.Biography: Anne-Marie Beller is Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Loughborough University, UK. Her research interests are in the Sensation Novel, New Woman Writing, Victorian periodicals, and 19th century constructions of gender, genre, and sexuality. Anne-Marie has published widely on sensation fiction, and is currently working on a number of projects, including a critical edition of Geraldine Jewsbury’s Athenaeum reviews and an edited collection on George Egerton. Key texts: Mona Caird, 'The Yellow Drawing Room' [1892], in Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1890 – 1914, ed. Angelique Richardson (London: Penguin, 2002) pp.21-30. Ella D'Arcy, 'The Pleasure Pilgrim' [1895], in Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1890 - 1914 (London: Penguin, 2002) pp.140-167.Hannah Champion, ‘“Preposterous Fancies” In A “Plain, Common World”: Curiousness In Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “The Prism”’“Diantha Fielding […] was in a curious position”The nineteenth century has been defined by Marylynne Diggs as “a period of contentious struggle over the definition and representation of a lesbian sexuality—a struggle in which writers of popular fiction were, by the 1850s, active participants” (Diggs, Marylynne. “Romantic Friends or a ‘Different Race of Creatures’? The Representation of Lesbian Pathology in Nineteenth-Century America” in Feminist Studies 21 (1995): 317–40. 321). Mary Wilkins Freeman, in her representation of strong, unconventional women, couldbe understood as one such “active participant”.Freeman wrote her short story “The Prism” in 1901, at the end of this turbulent century in which gender norms had been reexamined and reformulated. Her protagonist Diantha Fielding is a “curious” girl who does not fit into the acceptable normative stereotypes of the period. The story narrates Diantha’s ability to escape the surrounding “plain, common world” through the fantastical images created by her prism. Between the shifting rainbow colors Diantha sees “beautiful little people moving and dancing in the broken lights across the fields”. Yet in exchange for life as a married woman, her “preposterous fancies” must be (literally) buried and her “birthright” ignored.I argue that the contemporary understanding of “queerness”—as an offensive on normalized social constructions—can be identified in nineteenth-century short stories. Using Bonnie Zimmerman’s notion of the “resistant reader” this paper aims to uncover the linguistic methods and queer code words used by Freeman in her characterization of the inexplicable Diantha Fielding. The palimpsestual nature of the story, with its mysterious connotations, gaps and absences, could offer a resistant reader an alternative understanding of the text, one that plays with gender binaries and threatens hetero-normative society. This paper aims to further the process of reexamining nineteenth-century women’s short stories as potential sites of queer possibility.Biography: Hannah Champion is associated with The University of Eastern Finland and Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France, as part of her joint PhD project. HerMasters thesis was concerned with queering Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s TheHouse of Mirth and her PhD thesis examines underlying sexual deviancies innineteenth-century short stories by various women writers including Mary WilkinsFreeman.Key text: ‘The Prism’ is available through our Dropbox or at: HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" Chapman, ‘Visiting and Expectation in Joseph Conrad’s “Amy Foster” and “To-morrow”’During a century increasingly dominated by a whole range of prescribed rhythms, rules for visiting proliferated in nineteenth-century advice manuals. These rules attempted to negate the unexpected and idealised predictability. At the same time, the final decades of this period saw the growth of genre fiction (fiction such as detective or adventure stories, for example), which popular general magazines such as the Strand Magazine encouraged. This fiction becomes generic as it repeats features of form and content, developing expectations. In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, we find writers finding ways to negotiate the genre-producing mass market. This paper focuses on Joseph Conrad, whose short fiction resists categorisation. He used tropes of visiting in ways that suggest his negotiation of the publishing market’s expectations. I consider ‘Amy Foster’ and ‘To-morrow’ in their original, illustrated, mass-market publishing contexts, and find Conrad to consider the idealisation of predictability, an idealisation that resulted from society’s desire to render interruption expected. My paper questions what is at stake when we think about expectation, whether considering hospitality or genre. In so doing I address the late nineteenth-century compulsion to render the unexpected expected. This enables me to ask how Conrad managed the expectations of the genre fiction market in which short fiction writers had to participate at the turn of the century. Biography: Anne Chapman has recently been awarded her PhD at King's College London. Her thesis?‘Interruption and Short Fiction 1866-1914’ was?completed as part of the AHRC funded project?Scrambled Messages: The Telegraphic Imaginary 1857-1900. She currently?teaches in the English department at King’s College London.Key texts: Joseph Conrad, ‘Amy Foster’, Illustrated London News, 14 December 1901, pp. 915-16; 21 December 1901, pp. 965-66; 28 December 1901, pp. 1007-8; Joseph Conrad, ‘To-morrow’, Pall Mall Magazine, August 1902, pp. 533-547.Illustrated originals: HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" ? HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" ?(Click on the page numbers to access then use drop down menu to find correct page.).?Also at Project Gutenberg:? HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" print version: Conrad, Typhoon and other?Stories (London: Penguin, 2007)Elke D’hoker, ‘Women’s Work: Short Story Series in The Woman At Home’In my paper I propose to investigate the short story series about professional women which Annie S. Swan published in the late-Victorian women’s monthly The Woman at Home between 1894 and 1909. A popular and best-selling novelist, Annie S. Swan was the figurehead of the magazine at that time and contributed a story as well as an editorial column to every issue. Some of these stories are single pieces, but most are part of a series, centred on a recurring narrator and/or protagonist. Examples of such series are “Elizabeth Glen, M.B. The Experiences of a Lady Doctor” (1893-4); “Memories of Margaret Grainger, schoolmistress” (1894-5); “Mrs Keith Hamilton, M.B.” (1895-6); “Miss Ferrar’s Paying guests” (1897-98); “Sister Ursula” (1900-1); “The Journal of a Literary Woman in London” (1902-3), and, under the pseudonym David Lyall, a series about a boarding house for middle-class working girls in Paris (1908-9).In spite of the magazine’s overall emphasis on women’s domestic life, these series all foreground professional women – a doctor, a journalist, a schoolmistress – and draw on the repetition-with-variation pattern of the story series to relate different incidents in the working life of these protagonists. In my paper I propose to investigate two exemplary short story series (“Elizabeth Glen” and “Mrs Keith Hamilton”) with regard to both form and content. In terms of form, I will analyse the stories’ presentation and embeddedness within the magazine as a whole as well as the tension between overall plotline and individual instalments in these serialised stories. In terms of content, I will discuss Annie Swan’s attempts to reconcile the magazine’s conservative domestic ideals with the figure of the professional woman. This middlebrow negotiation of progressive notions seems quite typical of this late-Victorian magazine, yet it also results in uneasy tensions within the stories themselves.Biography: Elke D’hoker is senior lecturer of English literature at the University of Leuven, where she is also co-director of the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies and of the modern literature research group, MDRN. She has published widely in the field of modern British and Irish fiction, with special emphasis on the short story, women's writing and narrative theory. She is the author of a critical study on John Banville (Rodopi, 2004) and has edited or co-edited several essay collections: Unreliable Narration (De Gruyter, 2008), Irish Women Writers (Lang, 2011), Mary Lavin (Irish Academic Press, 2013) and The Irish Short Story (Lang, 2015). Her new monograph, Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story was published by Palgrave (2016). Key text: “Elizabeth Glen, M.B. The Experiences of a Lady Doctor”: available through our Dropbox account.Angharad Eyre, ‘Something Sensational to Read in the Train: College Women and the New Woman Short Story’In 1898, Nesta Bevan, a Westfield College student, wrote a story for the September issue of her college magazine, titled “A Golden Hour: A Study in Up-To-Date-Hero-Worship”. In many ways the story resembled the sensational New Woman short stories being published at this time in periodicals. For example, the story takes place in the modern space of a train carriage and tells of a chance encounter between strangers, and a conversation between a New Woman and a male sensation fiction author.In this paper I will compare Bevan’s amateur piece with Sarah Grand’s story, ‘When the Door Opened –’ published in January of the same year in the Idler. This story, also set in a train carriage, deals with modern anxieties about marriage: a case of mistaken identity at a masked ball causes the male protagonist to doubt his wife’s fidelity and bring home a prostitute in her place. Though Bevan uses the same setting as Grand, the anxieties her story speaks to are somewhat different. Instead of a story of sexual transgression, hers is a story of intellectual transgression, as the New Woman stridently gives her opinions of the book she is reading and interrupts her fellow passenger. Mistaken identity in this case leads the New Woman to not recognise her fellow passenger as the author of her book, and she misreads his work as ‘a great moral lesson’.The anxieties of Bevan’s story, I argue, are reflective of the concerns of a new generation of College New Women, and her all-female context leads to a story that reveals another facet of late nineteenth-century society. Furthermore, Bevan’s position outside the periodical press allows her to express anxiety about the modern literary marketplace: the New Woman is not only threatening marriage, but is also throwing literary standards into confusion.Biography: Angharad Eyre is a teaching associate at Queen Mary, University of London. Her PhD focused on the significance of the female missionary for nineteenth-century women writers and college women, and included a chapter based on her research in the Westfield College archive. Key text: ‘A Golden Hour’ available on Dropbox.Valerie Fehlbaum, ‘Not Waving, but Laughing’Last time I spoke about short fiction at the VPFA annual conference in 2016, I concentrated on rather morbid issues. This time I’d prefer to discuss the humour in short stories of the period and in particular those of Ella Hepworth Dixon. Generally speaking, women are often denied humour, and New Woman writers were no exception. They were much more commonly the butt of jokes rather than recognized as perpetrators of laughter. Humour could, however, diffuse some of the hostility such women had to face, as well as present serious topics in a more palatable fashion, as I hope to show Dixon usually managed to do.Most famed for her New Woman novel The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), Dixon also wrote innumerable short stories, and in fact her first book was a collection of sketches entitled My Flirtations (1892). This short story series, originally published anonymously in the Lady’s Pictorial and then ascribed to ‘Margaret Wynman’ when published in book-format, not surprisingly, given the name of the female protagonist, deals primarily with the perennial trials and tribulations of the marriage market. Not only does Dixon satirize contemporary mores in general, much fun must also have been had trying to identify the real-life models for the protagonist’s suitors, including Oscar Wilde and Richard le Gallienne. So successful was it that Robbie Ross in his 1892 review declared ‘a new humourist has arisen’.Nor did this mark the end of Dixon’s humorous writing. The Story of a Modern Woman, which even Dixon herself described as ‘rather gloomy’, seems to contain her fundamental credo: ‘a sense of humour is what women should cultivate above all else’…and that is precisely what she attempted to do throughout her long career.Biography: Valerie Fehlbaum teaches in the English Department at the University of Geneva where she specializes in the nineteenth century and Shakespeare. Her primary research interests are Victorian periodicals and fin-de-siècle literature, especially that of the so-called New Woman writers many of whom contributed innumerable short stories to the periodical press.Key text: Chapter V of My Flirtations, available at: HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" Granata, ‘Romance At Short Notice: Mysterious Objects And Surprising Stories In Fergus Hume’s Hagar Of The Pawn Shop (1898)’My paper focuses on Hagar of the Pawn Shop, a series of short stories published by Fergus Hume in 1898. Hagar, a gipsy girl temporarily in charge of a pawn shop, performs amateur investigations on the objects she encounters in her job. Each story pivots on a single material item, which hides (and eventually helps reveal) some secret concerning its owner. But the objects also open compelling vistas on the period in which they were produced (especially the Renaissance) or on the countries they come from (mostly Italy, China, or Persia). In this way, each item contributes to enrich with wonder and exoticism a prosaic and remarkably modern world, providing intriguing insights on late-Victorian views of the past and other cultures.The stories recurrently oppose the grimy context in which Hagar lives and works to the unexpected, adventurous nature of the cases she solves. The narrator’s pervasive references to fairy tales within a ‘realistic’ frame further emphasise the pawns’ incongruity with their surroundings, thus foregrounding their capacity to brighten up an apparently shabby world. Indeed, the pawns provide ‘romance at short notice’, and become a vehicle for adventurous journeys which are both physical and of the mind.Building on recent scholarly contributions about literary ‘things’, I will argue that the very structure of the tales, together with their seriality, allows the author to use objects in a way that is peculiar to the short story. While the coherence of the collection is granted by the narrative frame and the repetitive plot-line of the tales, each object opens up to different genres, or to mixed generic forms, confirming the short story’s proneness to hybridity and experimentation.Biography: Silvia Granata is tenured lecturer at the University of Pavia. She is the author of two monographs: The Dear Charities of Social Life (2008) and Take Every Creature in, of Every Kind (2010). She has published articles on literature and science, and on late-Victorian detective fiction.Key text: Hagar of the Pawn Shop is available at the following link and the key stories are: “The first customer and the Florentine Dante”, "?“The sixth customer and the silver teapot”, “The fourth customer and the crucifix”: HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" Hardy, ‘“Bitter To The Taste But Bracing In The Result”: Medicine And The Short Story In Arthur Conan Doyle’s Collection Round The Red Lamp’In his preface to Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life (1894), Conan Doyle writes that “it is the province of fiction to treat painful things as well as cheerful ones.” The short stories he gathers in this collection – fifteen in total – depict the fictional lives of surgeons, doctors and scientists in the course of their daily lives. While Conan Doyle’s former career as a general practitioner might partially explain his fascination with the medical world, the author’s choice to preserve some of these short stories from a serialised publication in periodicals is arguably more perplexing. “In book-form,” he states, “the reader can see that they are medical stories, and can, if he or she be so minded, avoid them.” This declaration translates a conscious decision from the writer to treat the theme of medicine in a specific literary format, that of the short story collection, thus suggesting intricate connections between the medical sphere and short fiction.This paper aims to analyse such parallels in an attempt to highlight the structural and aesthetic strategies employed by Conan Doyle to unite form and content. The concentrated nature of his tales will be seen as an echo of the brevity of a medical consultation, and the diseased body, as dealt with in the collection, will be analysed as the reflection of the fragmented form of the short story. The author’s comparison of his own fiction to a “tonic in medicine, bitter to the taste but bracing in the result,” will be examined through the prism of short fiction theory, with a particular interest in the “anatomical” specificities of the Victorian short story.Biography: Zoe Hardy is completing a PhD in British Literature at the University of Angers and in joint registration with the University of Leuven, under the supervision of Pr. Emmanuel Vernadakis, Pr. Elke D’hoker and Dr. Michelle Ryan-Sautour. Her thesis is entitled “'Paternity' and artistic creation in H.G. Wells, R.L. Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle's short fiction for young adults”.Key texts: “The Curse of Eve” (1894): HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" “His First Operation” (1894) HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" “The Doctors of Hoyland” (1894): HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" Hayes, 'Darkest Wessex: Hardy, the Gothic Short Story, and Masculinity'The short story is a perfect platform for Gothic fiction, both being dependent upon 'sudden swift impressions', or what David Blair describes as 'a sequence of effects, each of which needs in some way to be more strange and unexpected than the last' in order to add gravitas to the subject matter (David Blair, ed., Gothic Short Stories, 2002, Wordsworth Editions). The Gothic tradition was transgressive, a reaction against the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason and the ordered symmetry of neo-Classicism. The Gothic subverts what is knowable and controllable, emphasizing interiority as well as exterior characteristics traditionally symbolized by the tropes of incarceration and perversion, and usually set within such facades as castles, dungeons and monasteries. The Gothic tradition utilizes a language of monstrosity and degeneration, highlighting cultural demonization and ostracism. Thomas Hardy appropriates this language throughout many of his short stories and employs it in various ways to question assumptions of masculine sensibility.This paper will illustrate how Hardy adopted and subverted the Gothic tradition in order to explore social and psycho-sexual constructions of nineteenth-century masculinity as represented within three particular tales: 'Barbara of the House of Grebe', 'The Fiddler of the Reels', and 'The Withered Arm'. Ideas of masculinity and manliness are far from stable or fixed, and as such cannot be considered as a monolithic hetero-normative construct. Masculinity can also be understood in terms of specific historical junctures, definitions of what constituted manliness varying wildly across the span of the Victorian period. The spectrum of Gothic story-telling contains tales of madness, violence, spectres and folklore in order to express some of the human mind's deepest fears – insanity, sexuality, death, and the power of the past to catch up with the present. The brevity of the short-story format provides the perfect vehicle through which such subjects may be conveyed to greatest effect.Biography: Tracy Hayes is an Early Career Researcher, having been awarded her PhD by the Open University in June 2017. She is currently applying for lecturing and post-doctoral positions while undertaking research for her next project which will?focus on the Gothic and masculinity in the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, Thomas Hardy and M.R. James. Her PhD thesis investigated representations of masculinity within the novels of Thomas Hardy, and she is now wishing to expand upon this by concentrating specifically on short stories and the Gothic tradition.Key texts: 'Barbara of the House of Grebe' (1890), 'The Fiddler of the Reels' (1893), and 'The Withered Arm' (1888) are all readily available as parts of collected short story collections – e.g. Penguin Classics, The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales, (1979).Jennifer Jones, ‘Insensible Victims and Unfeeling Surgeons: Anxiety about the Abuse of Power in Antivivisectionist Short Stories’The popular myth of chloroform is that it produces instant insensibility. In fact, chloroforming willing patient takes about as long as it takes to read a short story: fifteen minutes or more. In this paper, I will look at how the abuse of the power chloroform gives surgeons over their patients enables unscrupulous surgeons to experiment on human subjects. In Arabella Kenealy’s ‘A Human Vivisection’ (The Ludgate, 1896) the Professor pays a poor man to submit to being chloroformed and vivisected. However, the Professor’s real plan is to let the chloroform wear off so he can ‘test the heart’s action under the influence of pain’ (44). Similarly, Dr Kort, in L. T. Meade’s Stories of the Sanctuary Club, chloroforms his wife so he can trephine her and subject her to experiments that enable him to control her movement, thought, and speech. They expect to be allowed to carry out any experiment they wish, ostensibly at least, in the pursuit of knowledge and criticise anyone who objects as being weak or opposed to scientific progress. However, the representations of such characters highlight not the importance of scientific advancement, but rather the conflict between the ideal of the middle-class professional man (with his self-restraint and compassion) and the brutes Kenealy and Meade depict their surgeons to be. These stories explore late-Victorian fears about the power doctors hold over others and the need to believe that norms of class and gender identity will work to keep this power in check, but for every Dr Cato or Chetwynd, the founders of the Sanctuary Club, who leads to the conviction of a Dr Kort, there is a Grimston, Kort’s colleague, who passively drinks himself into a stupor while giving the Professor free rein. Biography: Dr Jennifer Diann Jones is a researcher at the University of Portsmouth. She is currently working on a book-length study on anaesthesia in Victorian literature and culture and is co-editing a volume on literary orphans. Jennifer has work published or forthcoming in Studies in the Novel, Victoriographies, The George Eliot Review, and Peer English.Key text: ‘A Human Vivisection’, in Dropbox.Tatiana Kontou, ‘Beyond the Ruin’In this paper I draw on Dylan Trigg’s exposition of the ruin as an opening where spectrality and trauma come together but ‘cannot be reconstructed in a conventional narrative’ to read three Victorian ghost stories that negotiate the ruin metaphorically and as a setting for ghostly sightings. Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ (1852) and Florence Marryat’s ‘The Box with the Iron Clamps’ (1868) feature fallen women whilst Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Open Door’ (1882) deals with the ramifications of the delayed return of a prodigal son. The ruined lives and the ghostly sightings amongst ruins become intermingled. The living characters who see the ghosts or are indelibly affected by a buried past are called to piece together a narrative made up of ‘hearsay’, servant’s stories and personal memories, unearth and finally reconcile with the ruined lives that return through spectral sightings.Biography: Tatiana Kontou is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Oxford Brookes University. She is the author of?Spiritualism and Women’s Writing?and has published essays on Wilkie Collins, sensation fiction, psychic detectives. She has edited volumes on spiritualism and the occult and is currently editing a collection on?Victorian Material Culture.Key texts: Gaskell: HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" Lambert, ‘Expect The Unexpected: Masculinity In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Shorter Fiction’Gaskell’s acute interest in the individual included a willingness to explore the allocation of gender and gendered roles, particularly where these were on the margins of what might be acceptable to contemporary society. This applies in particular to her interest in the traits of character that comprise masculinity and femininity. She uses the intimacy of a domestic setting to provide a contained and apparently safe environment in which to focus on the ways in which gender influences character and behaviour.This paper focuses on men in two of her shorter fictions: Monsieur de la Tourelle in ‘The Grey Woman’ (1861) and Edward Wilkins in ‘A Dark Night’s Work’ (1863). Despite his priapic name, Monsieur de la Tourelle appears initially as an effeminate, lisping suitor to the inexperienced Anna, powdered and primped to social perfection. His courtship of her is nonetheless relentless, and on their marriage, he takes her to his remote castle in France, far away from her family and friends, where he is revealed as the leader of a bloodthirsty and ruthless gang of ‘chaffeurs’. Gaskell explores the limits of sexuality in this short story with its scenes of cross-dressing and self-mutilation. Edward Wilkins, by contrast, is presented as the perfection of Victorian masculinity whose drunken manslaughter of his partner exposes the damaging effects of a social and cultural construct which inhibits and represses character and behaviour. Biography: Carolyn Lambert is a visiting lecturer at the University of Brighton where she teaches nineteenth-century literature. ?She is the author of The Meanings of Home in Elizabeth Gaskell's Fiction (2013) and co-editor with Marion Shaw of For Better, For Worse: Marriage in Victorian Novels by Women (2017). ?She has a chapter entitled 'Female Voices in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton'?in a forthcoming publication from Bloomsbury edited by Adrienne E Gavin and Carolyn W de la Oulton. ?She is currently writing a monograph on Frances (Fanny) Trollope for the Key Popular Women Writers series.Key texts: Gaskell, ‘The Grey Woman’: HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" Catalog Record: The grey woman, and other tales; ‘A Dark Night’s Work’: HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" Catalog Record: A dark night's workEmma Liggins, ‘Victorian Women’s Ghost Stories and the Haunted Space: from Elizabeth Gaskell to Margaret Oliphant’This paper explores the representation of haunted space in Victorian women’s ghost stories, focussing particularly on the haunted house. How did Victorian women writers use the conventions of the ghost story to examine concerns about space and place, and women’s experiences of the domestic? What is important about the specific rooms or spaces where ghosts appear, and how do the restricted movements of the ghosts compare with the restricted movements of Victorian women? If, according to Simon Hay (2011), the nineteenth-century haunted space is often ‘an aristocratic property into which commoners are moving’, then this becomes a site of disruption to household hierarchies. Female servants and older unmarried women can be seen to play key roles within short fiction, both protecting and unravelling the secrets of the past. The rise of spiritualism also influenced Victorian representations of the supernatural, of the seen and unseen. Conceptualisations of liminality and invisibility often associated with understandings of the ghost story can be reconsidered in relation to spatial theory, particularly Gaston Bachelard’s notion of the ‘inside/outside dialectic’.I use stories such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Old Nurse’s Tale’ (1852) and ‘The Crooked Branch’ (1859) and Margaret Oliphant’s ‘Old Lady Mary’ (1885) to reconsider the connections between the ancestral rural home and women’s positions within the domestic economy. I examine the gendering of haunted space, and the ways in which Gaskell and Oliphant used the haunted house narrative to challenge the regulation of female behaviour. Both ghosts and women are locked outside, or within, the country house, or remain ‘unseen’ to the next generation. The settings of the Victorian ghost story are bound up with the woman writer’s uses of the explained supernatural. Bibliography: Dr Emma Liggins is Senior Lecturer in English Literature in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her publications include George Gissing, the Working Woman and Urban Culture (Ashgate, 2006), The British Short Story (with Andrew Maunder & Ruth Robbins) (Palgrave, 2011) and Odd Women? Spinsters, Lesbians and Widows in British Women’s Fiction, 1850-1939 (Manchester University Press, 2014). She has also published an article on Vernon Lee and the supernatural in Gothic Studies (2013), and has a chapter on modernist women’s ghost stories in British Women’s Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now eds. Emma Young and James Bailey (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). She is currently writing a book on The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories: Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850-1945, to be published by Palgrave in 2020.Vicky Margree, ‘The Good Memsahib: Marriage, Infidelity and Empire in Alice Perrin’s Anglo-Indian Tales’Alice Perrin’s stories of Anglo-Indian life frequently take marriage as their object of study. This paper reads the stories as articulating a form of colonial female subjectivity seen as promising to allow British women successfully to perform their duties as imperial wives. However, it also argues that this project is haunted by a recognition of the difficulties of marriage. I shall contend that Perrin’s frequent foregrounding of troubled marriages, illicit relationships and the temptations of adultery, in fact puts her into contact with a set of authors with whom she is not normally associated and from whom she has many ideological differences: the New Woman writers of the domestic British fin de siècle.Two examples from Perrin’s 1901 East of Suez collection illustrate this paradox particularly well. ‘In the Court of Conscience’ is a brief tale in which a young Anglo-Indian wife is tormented by the secret she keeps from her husband: that she had not loved him when they married. As Melissa Edmundson Makala notes, the tale puts the resources of short fiction to good use by introducing an unexpected element into a seemingly predictable story; but I shall argue that its apparently happy ending is not all that it seems. In ‘An Eastern Echo’ another young wife’s marital domesticity is disturbed by a fleeting telepathic link with a colonial police officer at the moment of his death. Both these tales characterise marriage as a compromise which, although necessary, entails significant sacrifice. But ‘An Eastern Echo’ also displays Perrin’s tendency to employ the supernatural as a way of providing sublimated satisfaction of female desires that cannot or should not be fulfilled in more direct ways.Biography: Vicky Margree is Principal Lecturer at the University of Brighton. She is author of Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone (2018) and co-editor of Richard Marsh, Popular Fiction and Literary Culture, 1890-1915 (2018). She is currently completing a monograph, British Women’s Short Supernatural Fiction, 1860-1930: Our Own Ghostliness, and is co-founder – with Lucy Andrew – of the Short Story Network.Key texts: ‘In the Court of Conscience’ and ‘An Eastern Echo’ in East of Suez, ed. Melissa Edmundson Makala (Victorian Secrets, 2010).Lindy Moore, ‘The Periodical Market and the Evangelical Short Story: Isabella Fyvie Mayo and the Sunday Magazine, 1867-1873’In the early nineteenth century religious fiction began drawing on historical realism and the domestic setting, and in the 1860s writers began adopting themes from the new sensation literature to increase its popularity. In contrast, evangelical fiction does not immediately spring to mind as a genre when the relationship between Victorian short fiction and the periodicals market is considered. Nevertheless, between 1867 and 1873, Isabella Fyvie Mayo contributed some twenty-five short stories (in addition to three serialised novels) to The Sunday Magazine, a periodical founded in 1864 by Scottish publisher Alexander Strahan, as a family magazine suitable for reading and discussing on the Sabbath. This was a time of evangelical concern about the expanding production of books and periodicals, and fiction was seen as presenting an especial challenge to the primary position of the Scriptures as ‘The Word’ of God. There was therefore controversy about its inclusion in a publication also carrying serious theological prose and the fiction was required to be non-sensational, with both moral and religious pointers.This paper considers the methods Isabella Fyvie Mayo used to provide and sustain interest in her stories, given these editorial constraints. These included her use of a framing device which established a familiar setting for regular readers, setting individual short stories within a larger narrative story, and her use of both male and female authorial voices. The extent to which she used a dramatic structure, or relied instead on a narrative style combining a format of parables, sketches and a version of Bildungsroman, is considered.Biography: Lindy Moore is an independent researcher. She is researching the life of evangelical author, Tolstoyan and anti-racism campaigner, Isabella Fyvie Mayo (1843-1914). Her most recent chapter examines Fyvie Mayo’s literary opposition to racism and imperialism and she is currently examining the portrayal of emigrants and emigration in her fiction.Key texts: Ruth Garrett, ‘Milly Hayden’, White as Snow: being the extra number of The Sunday Magazine, Christmas 1869. Republished in Edward Garrett and Ruth Garrett, White as Snow (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph & Co., [1870 etc.]) Edward Garrett, ‘A chance child’,? The Sunday Magazine, vol. 7 (1870-1871 [April 1, 1871), pp.385-395. Republished in Seen and Heard, by the author of Occupations of a Retired Life, 3 vol., London: Strahan & Co, 1872, Vol I, pp. 232-308. Transcribed by Gerald Massey ( HYPERLINK "" \l "Chance" \t "_blank" ). Ruth Garrett, ‘The Quiet Miss Godolphin’, The Sunday Magazine, vol. 7 (1870-1871 [May 1871]), pp. 487-497. Republished in Seen and Heard, by the author of Occupations of a Retired Life, 3 vol., (London: Strahan & Co, 1872), vol 2, pp.1-85.Christopher Pittard, ‘Grant Allen’s “Jerry Stokes”, the Death Penalty, and the Scene of Writing’By the mid-1890s, the Strand Magazine had become famous as the pre-eminent venue for late Victorian detective fiction. Yet while such stories were focused on analysis and detection (rarely covering questions of trial and punishment), the first detective story to appear in the Strand acts as a striking exception. Grant Allen’s ‘Jerry Stokes’ (1891) presents a Canadian hangman who becomes convinced that a man convicted of murder is innocent, writes a conscience-provoking letter to the actual criminal, and as a result of his detection resigns as state executioner. The story inverts the more usual model of detective fiction that Allen would go on to write: the process of detection is treated briefly and the mechanics of trial and execution become the narrative focus. Stokes’ invocation of a Lombrosian criminology ends up implicating himself as the criminal type; the revelation that the state is a judicial murderer modernises the Oedipal trope of detective as criminal. This paper thus explores Allen’s critique of execution (including the narrative’s displacement from the UK to Canada, making its criticism of capital punishment sufficiently indirect for the wider editorial policy of the Strand) and the construction of law (in the story’s original title ‘The Law’s Delay’).Drawing on Derrida’s exploration of writing and state execution in The Death Penalty, this paper pays particular attention to the status of writing as the means by which Stokes brings the murderer to justice, composing a letter to provoke a confession, and replacing execution with writing. The story’s initial appearance in the Strand Magazine emphasises the connection, preceding the first page of ‘Jerry Stokes’ with a facsimile of Allen’s handwritten manuscript, calling attention to the material processes of the short story. If the death penalty has been theorised as a state of exception, then I read Allen’s story as a moment of exception in the wider conservative ideology of the Strand Magazine and the development of detective fiction.Biography: Christopher Pittard is senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth. His publications include articles in Studies in the Novel, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century and Victorian Periodicals Review, and the books Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction (Routledge, 2011) and The Cambridge Companion to Sherlock Holmes (Cambridge UP 2018, co-edited with Janice Allan).Jonathan Potter, ‘Mere Glimpses: Fragments and narrative ambiguity in popular short stories’A short story from mid-summer 1884, published in the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, builds a narrative around the surprise find of a fragment of a lantern slide which had been buried in the flower bed. Startled by his uncle’s reaction to the fragment, the first-person narrator asks: ‘Is there any history attached to it that you look at it so strangely?’ (‘Romance of a Magic Lantern’, Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 12 July 1884, 9.) The found fragment, the strange look, and the query, then prompt a story drawn from the uncle’s memory. The story ends ambiguously with the reader left unsure whether the uncle’s tale really was a recounted memory or whether it was a fantasy, or a little of both. This kind of structure, in which a glimpse of something unexpected leads to an explicitly subjective narrative – usually a memory or fantasy - is a common trope within the short fiction of the nineteenth-century periodical press. Elsewhere, for example, we find men fantasising about women’s photographs glimpsed in shop windows or daydreaming about scenes seen through stereoscopes, and fiction machines developing stories like photographs directly from people’s brains. These short stories all share a preoccupation with individual interpretations of visual fragments that probe at the bounds between reality, memory, and fantasy. Mere glimpses are seemingly turned into ordered narratives, but ultimately readers are left with their own ambiguous fragments to interpret. This paper, then, explores the value of the short story form in experimenting with ambiguity and subjectivity, raising questions about gender, psychology, and narrative certainty. Biography: Having received his PhD on nineteenth-century literature and visual culture from the University of Leicester, Jonathan Potter is now a lecturer and tutor at Coventry University. His monograph, Seeing, Thinking, Writing in the Nineteenth Century: Discourses of Vision, is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.Brittany Roberts, ‘Plotting Sensation Stories: Affect and Intuition in Short Sensation Fiction’ The British short story is still an understudied form in Victorian studies, and particularly so in studies of sensation fiction. Despite rich and growing scholarship on sensation fiction and its relationship with literary markets and commodity culture, scholars have a had a difficult time shaking off its enduring brand “the novel with a secret,” which has problematically discounted an incredible body of periodical fiction that falls “short” of our expectations about what this kind of fiction looks like. Short periodical works, however, are crucial if we are to understand the nexus of consumerism, mass marketing, social anxiety, and literary production that first peaked in the 1860s, things which have largely come to organize our understanding of what was so “sensational” about this historical moment in time. Here, I posit sensation stories as a new genre of fiction, and I begin to outline how these stories take up the common themes and features of sensation novels (mistaken identity, excessive passion, family secrets, shocking revelations, etc.). I argue, however, that formal considerations required by short story writing encourage greater use of impressions and feelings than even the novel, whose labyrinthine plotting privileges exposition and puzzle-piecing logic. The result is a plot that is often activated by a character’s inexplicitly intense feelings of mistrust or dread toward another character or situation, and whose emotional reactions then imbue otherwise ordinary circumstances with meaning. I will show how sensation stories suggest that deviance is best discerned through the body rather than the mind and how they create a path to pleasurable revelation where trusting one’s gut offers the most effective form of policing. Thus, these supposedly “unimportant” periodical works—sensational not only in the way they glutted periodicals with their sheer volume—could in turn promote suspicion and distrust in readers that was capable of damaging real-life bonds and relationships.Biography: Dr Brittany Roberts is an Assistant Professor of English at Broward College. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida with a specialty in Victorian Literature. Her research focuses on popular nineteenth-century British short fiction, consumerism, affect, and sensation. She has works appearing in The Blackwell Companion to Sensation Fiction, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story (2018). Katherine Wise, ‘Reading/Seeing the Palimpsest in Emma Frances Dawson’s “An Itinerant House”’In his examination of Western fiction of the United States, John R. Milton states that poetry and short stories “have not flourished in the West simply because the subject (the place itself) is too big to encompass in a short work.” (67) Emma Frances Dawson’s urban, partly indoor ghost story, “An Itinerant House,” (1878) has no place as capital “W” Western literature in Milton’s insistence upon vast pagination. Milton assumes an equation of visual space with descriptive language, and a need for their similar quantification. Technological advances in the nineteenth century widened a visual culture that accompanied the massive output of writing, one particularly apparent in the books of the American West. This has led to a view of literature in metonymy with the visual land, as suggested by both Michelle Kohler and Janis Stout. Dawson’s story complicates this relationship with a palimpsest. She presents both a literary and visual palimpsests, in a way that destabilizes both through the haunting of a peripheral entity, the mysteriously dead/alive Felipa. Felipa haunts a house, a poem (an even shorter work), and a work of art; there and not, recovered and fading out of word and vision Dawson’s figure haunts by palimpsest, upsetting the many easy conflations of words and images that were present during her time. Felipa’s peripherality, in terms of race (a Mexican American), domesticity (a boarding house keeper who may or may not be married) and existence (she may or may not be dead or resurrected) destabilizes the grand narrative of the American West. A discourse to which Dawson recognizes, has pushed her aside. Dawson’s short story presents what Milton would not like to see in a form he so easily dismisses.Biography: Katherine Wise is currently working on her PhD at Kingston University, London on Western American women's ghost stories, haunting, and a discourse and/of space, race, gender, and nature. She has presented at conferences primarily on turn of the century ghost stories, by both American and British/colonial women, but has also presented on audio-horror, and film. She has posts on the International Gothic Association's Post Graduate Researcher Blog. Key text: Original: HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" . Annotated version: HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" ................
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